A journey down the rabbit hole of Rubik's-style puzzles

When you hit 9 subscribers, with Youtube Partnership staring you in the face, you do funny things. You realize, dang, I’ve got this. This is my thing. The sycophants are lined up and ready to eat Google-dispensed ads right out of my hands. All to get a glimpse of my cubing genius. Let me strap myself onto this bucking bronco and see where it takes me. No financial investment is too big, no amount of time is too large — this blog stands as the mystical entranceway to the next big zeitgeist.

</sarcasm>

Or, you just do something completely self-absorbed and beyond rationalization, such as investing $50 in developing branded video bumpers….

Having created a logo of sorts for my cubes in the form of custom stickers, used it as my avatar on cubing forums, and applied it as a watermark to a few videos, I thought I’d take the next step into using it to create an interesting bumper to my youtube videos. Poking around the interwebs, I discovered that the technical name for such bumpers is “logo sting.” I also realized that (a) although I own Adobe After Effects, the learning curve is about as steep as I would have imagined and (b) even if I learned the technical stuff, I have virtually no artistic skills. Plan B….

I stumbled onto Fiverr, an awesome site for hiring folks to do fun, clever, cutesy, whatever stuff for a whopping $5. Several had posted offers to make logo stings out of a logo, and I hit them up. At $5, what could I lose? The results were impressive for $5, but felt a little hokey; they lacked the polish for which I had hoped. Then I stumbled onto Video Hive, which offers a treasure trove of After Effects templates for title sequences, credits, and, yes, logo stings. One week and $50 later, I have a menu of 5 AIC-branded stings from which to choose:

Slices Reveal

// via Video Hive

Spinning Reveal

// via Video Hive

Flip Reveal

// via Fiverr

Dust Cloud Reveal

// via Fiverr

Particle Reveal

// via Fiverr

I embedded the above videos in roughly my order of preference. The first two, being more polished and complete, are my favorites. The last three are fine, but not special. As between the first two, I am really torn. “Slices” seems elegant, modern, and pithy — classy, minimal, and understated in just the right ways. It makes it feel like the logo was designed around the sting, and not the opposite. “Spinning” feels flashier and edgier, but not necessarily good ways. I fear that there’s a hokiness to it, just the same way I feel about ultra-modern homes from the ’90s. There’s a certain depth and naturalness missing.

For now, I’m going to treat “Slices” as the *one*. Below, I’ve appended it to my over-produced 36-second solve video as a proof of concept. I want to give a shout-out to David Franz, who created the Slices AEP template and helped me integrate my logo into it. Super nice and talented guy. And now, With no further adieu, the sting: